Nitrogen Capture

Anthony S. Travis is deputy director of the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published extensively on the history of chemistry and chemical technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Travis is recipient of four awards for his contributions to the history of chemistry. He has edited and co-edited several volumes and special issues of journals dealing with the history of science, technology and the environment. Publications include: The Rainbow Makers; The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe (Lehigh: Lehigh University Press, 1993); (with Carsten Reinhardt) Heinrich Caro and the Creation of Modern Chemical Industry (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); Dyes Made in America, 1915-1980: The Calco Chemical Company, American Cyanamid, and the Raritan River (Jerusalem: Edelstein Center/Hexagon Press, 2004); and most recently The Synthetic Nitrogen Industry in World War I: Its Emergence and Expansion (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015).

Introduction: Food or Famine.- Agricultural Chemistry.- The Quest for Fixed Nitrogen.- Ammonium Sulphate.- Electricity and the Chemical Industry.- The Direct Synthesis of Ammonia.- A Time of Guns and Grain.- Wartime Expansion of the Nitrogen Industry.- Billingham: "The Synthetic".- Non-BASF Ammonia Technology and Ammonia Oxidation.- The United States.- New Ideologies and National Security in the 1920s.- International Conferences, and an Adriatic Cruise.- Synthetic Nitrogen in the Soviet Union.- Imperial Japan: From Cyanamide to Synthetic Ammonia.- High-Pressure Synthesis and Later Developments.- Nobel Prizes and a New Technology.- A Legacy of Synthetic Nitrogen.- Catching up: Mainly Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union.- Conclusion.